Tools

Komodo Polyglot IDE 8.5 Darkens The Abyss

By Adrian Bridgwater, September 13, 2013

ActiveState Komodo enhanced for workflow plus new "Abyss dark" theme

ActiveState's Komodo 8.5 polyglot IDE arrives this week with new productivity-enhancing features including code refactoring options, multiple selections power, breadcrumbs file navigation, and functions for sorting and grouping of open files.

The new UI includes Abyss, a "much-requested" native dark theme. New language support includes Python symbol triggering and updates to PHP 5.5 code intelligence, debugging, and code profiling. Komodo 8.5 also offers faster performance, but refreshingly — ActiveState has actually explained why — due to updates to its underlying code base and more efficient process handling.

"As a multi-language IDE, Komodo is focused on increasing productivity," says Todd Whiteman, Komodo development lead. "With Komodo 8.5, we've found [a] balance between efficient UI design and programming-centric features such as refactoring, which save significant time when working on large projects."

Jeff Hobbs, ActiveState's CTO & VP of engineering, explains that because of its multi-language capabilities, Komodo is, in his estimation, "well suited" for developing a wide range of cloud-hosted applications. "Many development teams are now using Komodo in conjunction with ActiveState's Stackato PaaS platform, as its integrated deployment and debugging within Stackato offers an additional gain in productivity," he said.

Other features of Komodo 8.5 include the ability to sort and group open files by various attributes: language, file extension, directory, and location. There is PHP 5.5 and Python support: new Xdebug module, keyword updates, and code intel for the latest API data for PHP 5.5; and symbol triggering for Python. An updated code base here sees Mozilla 24, Python 2.7.5, Scintilla 3.34, plus the "sleek UI", with retina support and Abyss, a new native dark UI theme.

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